The stated purpose of this change was to increase Racket's popularity.
Someone asked, if Racket were already more popular, would this proposal
be made? The answer was, probably not.
It seems we're jumping over some questions:
1. More popular, among who?
[About "research language": Is it primarily popularity in "academia",
e.g. see more Racket in classrooms, in papers, and on conference
slides. Or in "industry"? Of course both is nice, but if we ever must
choose one as a priority, which one?]
2. How popular? Are we aiming for as popular as Clojure? Haskell?
Python? Java? JavaScript?
3. What are various possible ways to achieve this popularity, including
-- but not limited to -- changing the surface syntax?
4. Which are most likely to succeed? Which are most likely to backfire?
[Backfire? See e.g. New Coke. Or Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Excel. Also, I have
some experience trying to make software products more popular.
Sometimes successfully. Sometimes not. It's difficult. Most things
you try, don't help. Some hurt. It is pretty typical for e.g.
salespeople to complain, "How can we sell more if we don't add
certain exact features the competition has?". This is the way of
salespeople. ;) Often the features are added, at great effort, and
it turns out not to help at all. Sometimes, it actually alienates
existing customers, who chose you for the distinctive feature the
salespeople wanted killed. No more customers, just worse
word-of-mouth.]
4. Do we have some sense of how to rank them on effort and risk?
5. Given all that, what should we do?
I think it would be a mistake to skip this discussion.
Of course, if the PLT team wants to discuss and decide, privately,
that's their prerogative. In that case I wish they'd share some of the
choices considered and rationale. This would help folks understand who
Racket is intended for, going forward.
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p.s. I am NOT saying the following is what the decision should be. It is
only AN example. I don't even know if it would be my first choice --
because having the discussion is the whole point of figuring that out.
Having said that:
Let's say we wanted to aim (next, for now) for roughly "Clojure" level
of popularity. There are multiple companies using it, jobs, etc. It's
not nearly as popular as Java or Python, which is both good and bad.
Anyway, Clojure is relatively popular, "in spite of" sexprs, at least
partly because it runs on the JVM and JavaScript. As the Racket-on-Chez
effort concludes, and we wonder, what next, maybe a next step would be
to work on other backends, which IIRC was one of the stated benefits of
doing R-on-C.
Again, I'm not saying this is necessarily my preference or "vote". I'm
saying it's an example of a plan that flows from the previous plan.
People can understand why, immediately. It builds on top of Racket's
existing identity and "fan base", and keeps a distinctive feature.
p.p.s. The syntax proposal also seems to muddy the LoP and DSL messsage.
Maybe it's not strictly a contradiction. But it's a little confusing:
"LoP is great! You can choose the best way to express each part of each
program. Now, only some parts of some programs do a lot of math, for
which infix is nice. So guess what? We're going to urge everyone to
switch the default/public/core language to infix syntax. Just please
update documentation and books and tutorials and blog posts and gists
and Stack Exchange and...." So if this proposal indeed goes forward,
there probably needs to be some explainer or FAQ for this.
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